ABSTRACT
Atmosphere has become one of the most alluring concepts across the social sciences and humanities. This chapter explores interdisciplinary methods for sensing atmospheres. The starting point for the essay is the claim that atmospheres are both affective and meteorological. Methodologically, sensing atmospheres poses the question of how to sense variations in an expanded elemental milieu, while also finding ways of moving with these variations to enhance our capacities to act. This can be understood as the elaboration of an expanded sensory ethology, in which the properties and qualities of elemental atmospheres are sensed through different combinations of bodies and devices. The chapter exemplifies this by discussing interdisciplinary artistic experiments with devices for being and becoming airborne. It focuses on the work of artist and architect TomásSaraceno, foregrounding its capacity to help us experiment with methodological assemblages for sensing elemental atmospheres.
